The MyHeritage team - like any family - loves to get together and our annual costume party is one of our favorite events. Every year, we have lots of fun and the costumes are always impressive. Checking the photos from previous years, we realized how fast we've grown and how big the MyHeritage family has become.

He'll also speak in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide on general genealogy topics and what MyHeritage and WorldVitalRecords offers to family historians and genealogists.

He has a multi-faceted role at MyHeritage. With more than 20 years of genealogy experience, Daniel provides key contributions in product development, customer support and public relations; working with genealogy societies, bloggers and media; as well as speaking and attending conferences around the world. He also heads our translation department, where he has been instrumental in increasing MyHeritage’s global support for 38 languages for our website and software.Continue reading "Australia: MyHeritage chief genealogist to speak" »

Elisabeth is our new community manager for France & French-speaking communities around the world, including Switzerland, Belgium, Canada and elsewhere

At a very young age, Elisabeth became interested in her family history, especially her Italian roots. As a teenager, she constantly questioned her grandmother, eagerly taking notes. Her grandmother, soon to be 98, still loves sharing stories from her past.

In college, it was only natural that Elisabeth chose to study history. At 20, she lived for three months in Venice with her Italian cousins. Unfortunately, on that side of the family she only knows the names of her paternal grandparents’ parents. The archives of their small village – Mansuè, in the province of Treviso - were apparently destroyed in a fire, but she hopes to learn more one day. Continue reading "MyHeritage: Meet Elisabeth, our French community manager" »

It was another exciting day at RootsTech. The MyHeritage booth was very busy all day, as the team told those who stopped by how MyHeritage and World Vital Records can help advance their research. Visitors were a mix of those new to MyHeritage, along with those who were already members.

Schelly, Steve Morse and Mark

A large audience heard Dave Barney of Google present the many uses of Google for genealogy. He demonstrated various features, ranging from Google Maps and how to pinpoint your ancestors on a street level view map and how to zoom in to their historic homes, churches and more to show your family’s living history. He shared a photo of the Swedish church – still standing - where his ancestors were married more than two centuries ago. The building was shown in Google street view.

MyHeritage’s experience at RootsTech has been a success, from setup to live hangouts and a very busy booth on the first day.

MyHeritage booth at RootsTech, before the conference began

The team began setting up Wednesday afternoon. Our booth is a real standout with double arches of balloons in the MyHeritage logo colors. Everyone knows where our booth is located as the colorful balloons fly high above the exhibit floor.

MyHeritage Super Search

Today, the opening day, our CEO/founder Gilad Japhet demonstrated the new MyHeritage Super Search technology. The new online research system greatly expands search functionality and takes into account user errors, common name variations, and other important details which, in the past, have not been included in most ancestral searches. There are many options to filter results by collections, via additional refining, advanced search and filtering capabilities as demonstrated in his presentation. This exciting new research system is still under development.

Sara, our Scandinavian Community Manager, recently returned from a very successful Swedish genealogy conference in Norrköping and we’d like to share her experience with you...

Among meeting with many big names in Swedish genealogical circles, Sara met with Thomas Furth, Chairman of the Jewish Genealogy Society of Sweden and exchanged many ideas. She also met with Jojje Lintrup, genealogist at the Swedish Genealogical Association.

The Association is currently working on a very interesting project called Genealogy of immigrants, which works to (among other initiatives) get Swedes with foreign roots involved in their ancestry so they can pass the knowledge down. Jojje is both an experienced and knowledgeable genealogist and works as a project manager for the Swedish Federation of GenealogyWiki Roots.

Today MyHeritage is pleased to announce the acquisition of the popular Polish genealogy website, Bliscy.pl, in a move that will open a new range of possibilities in Polish family research -- for those in Poland or part of the greater community of Polish descendants worldwide.

With the acquisition of Bliscy.pl, half a million new users have been added to MyHeritage -- expanding our international family network to over 56 million people and 760 million profiles! Combined with last year’s acquisition of the Polish website MoiKrewni.pl, MyHeritage.com is now an excellent resource for anyone researching their Polish family history.

We recently celebrated the annual Purim Party for MyHeritage workers and their families - and couldn't wait to share with you what a fun night it was!

Purim is a festive holiday similar to Halloween. The employees began preparing some very impressive costumes, many of which were hand-made, several weeks in advance of the party.

The night was full of surprises, games and dancing - and the judging panel had a hard time deciding which was the best costume. Which costume would you choose as your favorite? Share with us your pick, leave a comment!

It's that time of the year again, when we give thanks to all our volunteers.

During 2010, our small army of some 100 volunteers helped us translate the MyHeritage website and our software program Family Tree Builder into about 25 of the currently available 36 languages.

Thanks to our dedicated volunteers, new languages - like Latvian - are about to be released on the website, and Afrikaans is expected very soon.

We are already working on many additional projects, such as translating the Family Tree Builder User Guide into more languages. A small group of people have also begun helping in the forums, providing answers to common questions posted there.

Our volunteers are a great help for us and we really appreciate their assistance, and we recognize them by the special icon next to their names throughout the website!